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The UK Will Block Online Porn From April. Proof Of free porn video
The UK will block online porn from April. Here's what we know
Age verification of all pornographic content will be mandatory from April 2018. But there are still a lot of grey areas
Online pornography in the UK is set to undergo its biggest ever change this year. The government will introduce an age-verification requirement for all pornographic websites and people wanting to use them will have to prove they are over 18.
The plans were initially announced in July 2017 with Matt Hancock, the then minister of state for digital and culture, saying the pornography block would be fully in place" by April 2018. Since then the government has been attempting to formalise the process of how websites should apply an age-verification system and establish a regulator for doing so.
During the course of changes, critics have hit back saying the changes will be dangerous to internet freedoms in the UK. Jerry Barnett, the founder of campaign group Sex & Censorship, told WIRED in 2017 that the legislation would “fundamentally change the internet in the UK and possibly globally”.
The changes for online pornography are being introduced under the Digital Economy Act. For the first time, he added, the government would have the power to block websites, en-masse, without court orders. “This is a first in a democracy,” he continued. “Although this appears to be just about protecting c***dren from porn, it isn't. It will block any site that doesn't comply with strict UK content rules.”
How age verification will be deployed
There are multiple ways that age verification could work under the new plans, but the government is very much leaving this up to the industry to decide. It has been mooted that a system that uses credit card authorisation, such as gambling websites do could be introduced.
MindGeek is one of the companies developing a "solution" for age verification on pornography websites. On its website it delivers a "world-class portfolio of entertainment experiences and IT solutions". It does not mention it owns some of the world's biggest porn sites, including Pornhub.
For age verification, MindGeek has developed AgeID. The company says it expects to sign-up 25 million people in the UK its system. According to Sky News, people will be able to login to AgeID with an email address and password, then use a third party system to check their age. AgeID will log which pornography websites are visited and store them.
There are concerns such a system could create giant databases of people accessing pornography. Pornhub, which is the world's most-visited pornographic website, had 64 million visitors per day in 2017, and the UK is its second biggest traffic driver. Such a database would be an obvious target for hackers, hoping to hold pornography sites to ransom. Just ask the owners of Ashley Madison, who recently offered customers $11 million in compensation after their details were published online by hackers.
A widely circulated press statement from MindGeek says its AgeID system has been "built from the ground up" and has "the principle of privacy by design at its core" and will fulfill the requirements of the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
It's expected MindGeek will allow third-party websites to use its AgeID tool to help them with their age verification requirements. "A wide variety of online age verification arrangements currently exist and so we expect that providers of online pornography will be able to choose the appropriate solution to meet their specific needs," the Department for Culture Media and Sport has said in a statement.
How will the UK porn block and age verification be enforced
After a large amount of indecision, at the start of February 2018 it was confirmed the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) would become the regulator for age verification. The body is currently responsible for setting the age restrictions (PG, 12A, 18, etcetera) on films broadcast in the UK. It can make recommendations to cut content, or deny a certificate and reject the media’s right to circulate in the UK.
Censoring the internet is, naturally, somewhat more complex. If a site is run on funds supplied via massive payment providers, such as Visa, those ancillary services could be notified their client is breaking the law, and ordered to terminate payments. Internet service providers could also be made to block sites that fail to comply.
The BBFC does have the power to fine porn sites that are in breach of the law (a sum no greater than £250,000 or five per cent of their “qualifying turnover”). In December 2017, David Austin the CEO of the BBFC said the new "regime" is designed to protect c***dren and vulnerable groups of people from "harmful content".
The government says the regulator will notify "non-compliant pornographic providers" and direct ISPS to prevent customers from accessing the websites.
What type of content will be blocked
Sex & Censorship’s Barnett has been concerned that a great deal of content could be caught in the new regulation’s net that shouldn't. But the law does attempt to clarify this. It refers to videos or parts of videos that are already assigned an R18 certificate, but goes on to refer to “any other material” that “would be an R18 certificate”.
The law also covers works “produced solely or principally for the purposes of sexual arousal” – the inclusion of the term “principally” seems subjective, and will require the BBFC to use its judgment, possibly creating its own rulebook of what is and is not NSFW. "This is legal content, and creating barriers for adults to access that legal content is in itself damaging to freedom of speech and access to information," Paul Bernal, a lecturer at UEA Law School and author of Internet Privacy Rights: Rights to Protect Autonomy, said in 2017.
Will it make any discernible difference?
The creation of age verification under the Digital Economy Act was justified by stats compiled by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to c***dren (NSPCC), which found that more than half of c***dren and teenagers that accessed pornography “stumbled upon” it. The changes could prevent the ‘stumbled upon’ factor, where young c***dren that have no intention of accessing pornography inadvertently do.
For anyone else actively seeking out the content, there will always be plenty of ways around the law. In the case of i*****lly downloaded media, for instance, it is not the government mandated ISP blocks that have had the greatest impact, but the rise of legal streaming sites. TorrentFreak’s 2016 annual report on the state of the sector attributed the stabilising of traffic to torrent sites to this rise.
The pursuit of pornography websites was a distraction from other, possibly bigger issues such as revenge porn and sexting. “Educating k**s can help deal with all of this much better. Educating them, that is, both in terms of sex and relationships, and in terms of the risks of the internet,” Bernal said. He added he would instead recommend better sex-ed from a young age, dealing with these issues head on. This is an approach extolled by the likes of EU k**s Online, which has been studying c***dren's online experience and education since 2006 and been recommending the same steps to government.
Will social networks be subject to the same laws?
At a debate on c***d online safety held in January 2017, several industry representatives voiced concerns that the likes of Twitter are massive purveyors of pornographic material, yet are rarely mentioned in government debates. “My concern is that with Twitter, k**s are going there; 13-year-olds can get a Twitter account and they allow hardcore imagery on their site without any checks whatsoever,” said David Cooke, director of digital and new media at Mindgeek.
The BBFC's Austin did say the organisation would “ask Twitter to close down an account that had hardcore pornography”, and classed it as an ancillary provider like payment providers, but added that it would not have “the power to compel it and we don't know how Twitter would respond”.
Will the porn block work?
A lot of uncertainties remain, even close to April 2018 deadline. The BBFC has not publicly stated how it will regulate and enforce the new provisions of the new law. Independent pornographers and privacy campaigners have not been happy with plans for the system. The Open Rights Group's executive director Jim Killock has said the "BBFC will struggle to ensure that Age Verification is safe, secure and anonymous".
Largely, the age verification element of the Digital Economy Act has been driven by moral arguments. This is not in itself a bad thing, and there is plenty of ongoing research exploring the impact of online pornography on c***dren and teenagers. But when potentially millions are due to be spent in staffing up the BBFC and creating new technologies to implement age-verification systems, a bit of qualitative and quantitative research would not go amiss.
This article was originally published in July 2017. It has since been updated with the latest plans around the UK's porn blocks.
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